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Magic & Manners

It is a truth universally accepted that well-bred members of Society are not beleaguered with magic.

For Elsabeth Dover and her sisters, that truth means living in a perpetual state of caution, never using their sorcerous gifts in public...

Atlantis Fallen

Book 1 of the Heartstrike Chronicles

A city hidden for five thousand years.

A man so ancient his early history is lost to time.

A woman who has nothing to lose...

Urban Shaman

Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt.
No worries. No pressure. Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams.
And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead bodyâbut she's just come across her second in three days.
It's been a bitch of a week.
And it isn't over yet.

Stone's Throe

JUSTICE WILL BE DONE!
Some girls languish under the weight of a broken heart, but not Amelia Stone. After a youthful encounter with the villain known as le Monstre aux Yeux Verts, Amelia is left with regrets - and a stalwart determination to right the wrongs of the world.

Bewitching Benedict

Benedict Fairburn does not quite need his ailing great-aunt's fortune, especially since he'll have to marry to get it. His family, however, thinks otherwise - as do many of the eligible ladies in London - and the pressure is mounting. An embarrassment of attentions fill Benny's time, but the young lady he prefers roundly dislikes him...

experiment

I appear to be running an experiment in weight loss. It’s a very good experiment, because it proves out, conclusively, every time. It goes something like this:

If I don’t eat sweets, and do exercise, for a week, I lose about a pound and a half in that time. If I do eat sweets and don’t exercise, I gain about a pound and a half (if I haven’t been exercising for quite a while, I just gradually gain weight, not at that excessive of a rate).

It works *every time*.

Knowing this–and I *do* know it–it should be easy to lose weight. All I have to do is exercise, which I like, and not eat sweets, which I love.

Somehow this is much, much harder than it says on the packaging.

Part of it is that even if the rule is simple–don’t eat sweets–I have a hard time mustering the discipline to do that while I’m working. All my focus is on getting the words written, and basically when I get hungry I just want to eat something nice, because, well, don’t I deserve it? Or something like that. What I need to do is invest some time and energy into making what Weight Watchers called zero-point or one-point snacks, which are basically low-calorie highly filling mini-meals. (That and/or eat a lot more apples, but one a day is usually about as much as I’m interested in.)

I *know* I can go off sweets entirely. The first couple days are okay, the third and fourth are hideous, the next week or so is okay, and days 10-12 or so are awful, and then it’s fine indefinitely, or at least up to 40 days, which is as long as I’ve ever done that. Interestingly, it’s easier, after that, to only have a treat every once in a while, without it triggering ZOMG MUST HAVE MORE, than it is to have a treat after 4 days and then survive to Day 10 or whatever.

I’ve tried, on occasion, to record a no-sweets log on my journal, based on “I’d better do it or Everybody Will Know!”, but I find I don’t actually give a damn if Everybody Knows that I blew it. T’ain’t about outside influence. Nor does a reward system hold any particular thrill for me: withholding some cool gadget from myself until X is achieved just pisses me off, and not in a way that says OH YEAH WELL FINE I’LL JUST *SUCCEED* AND THAT’LL SHOW YOU! So those aren’t real winners in the inspiration game. You’d think a closet full of cute clothes I don’t fit in would be inspiring, but apparently it’s not so much.

In my defense on the exercise front, I *have* been doing my Pilates. They, though, largely seem to be a strengthening and perhaps toning thing for me, rather than weight loss (maybe if I did them daily at a much more vigorous level, but I honestly think managing 3x a week is pretty good…). Swimming (or dance) is my preferred Real Exercise, and my shoulder is still not right*, which makes me basically afraid to swim. Foul weather’s kept me from walking (although that’s really a wahwahwah excuse, because it’s not like I’ll melt in the rain), though I think that like Pilates, walking more prevents me from gaining *more* weight than helps me lose what I’ve got. I just don’t get into Walking As Exercise enough to actually lose weight.

I don’t know. It’s frustrating that I know what to do, that I know it succeeds, but that I’m failing repeatedly to apply the necessary discipline. (That’s probably *particularly* frustrating because people say to me, very frequently, “You’re so disciplined!” due to me writing several thousand words a day. So although I don’t generally think of myself as all that disciplined, I seem to have developed this expectation that I am because people keep saying so, and then I completely and utterly fail to exact discipline over anything except the writing, so I end up extra-disappointed in myself.)

…I think I’ve made myself grumpy now, which is too bad, because I woke up in a pretty good mood, and now I have to shake the grumps off and go do my stupid work. *sigh*

*It’s better. It’s tightening up around early afternoon, which is probably from being too tense over the keyboard in the morning, but overall it’s *not* hurting more hours of the day than it *is* hurting. And yes, Erica, I will go see a PT when we have money, assuming there’s enough money to go see a PT…

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the PT helps, a LOT. my shoulder was pretty much useless in early January after way too much work, went to a PT for about 3 weeks and it still bothers me now and again, but it doesn’t HURT all the time now. and as a double bonus for me, I have yet to get billed for it :D